Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth Interview

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It's not going to be out until 2001, but you finally wore us down with your information requests.

By IGN Staff

If believe the truth is really out there, then you're probably already aware of H.P. Lovecraft. His novels of Cthulhu and other horrors, ancient evils buried below the earth, have long been a mainstay of twentieth century horror-suspense literature, predating its modern derivative, The X-Files, by decades. In Lovecraft's mythology Cthulhu is the high priest of the Great Old Ones, unnatural alien beings who ruled the Earth before humanity formed. It is said that They will return, causing worldwide insanity and mindless violence before finally displacing humanity forever. If this sets your pulse racing then the upcoming title, Dark Corners of the Earth, is for you.

Not surprisingly, the novels of H.P. Lovecraft have been touted as suitable material for an interactive RPG game for some time. Chaosium's pen and paper RPG, The Call of Cthulhu, was rated the second most popular title behind Dungeons and Dragons in a recent online poll. Headfirst tackled the problem, er... headfirst (ahem), and secured the rights to the game from Chaosium Inc. this year. The result is Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth for PC and PlayStation2. Although it's still in the very early stages of its development cycle, the game is already garnering a huge amount of attention from the RPG community.

From a first person perspective gamers are invited into the sinister and terrifying world of the Cthulhu Mythos rendered in 3D, with highly advanced realtime physics and Aureal 3D sound. But while we love invitations like this as much as the next guy, we're not so good at waiting. Instead, we tackled Headfirst's own Andrew Brazier to give us the low-down on what everyone hopes will be the scariest game ever.

Andrew Brazier: The best way to explain the game is to get the lowdown on Lovecraft and his novels. Lovecraft was quite a prolific author around the start of the last century, 1900's time. There's still loads of interest in his novels especially in America. The Cthulhu Mythos is the name given to his group of novels. Basically all his creations can be encompassed under that broad title. The general gist of most of his stories are about this ancient race of alien creatures who are immensely powerful, who used to rule the earth originally, and now live underground, and are waiting for the time they can take over the world. But generally, these creatures are so powerful that people just die on the spot when they see them, they have that amount of power. That's the whole story really. The RPG, the Call of Cthulhu is based around that premise really with the characters playing investigators who try and discover the secrets behind the whole mystery.

IGNPC: So how rigidly will you be sticking to the path of the novels?

AB: Our game will be set in the world and we'll be basing some of our stories on actual Lovecraft stories. But generally, we're just basing them on them, you can't follow them too precisely because otherwise it just ends up with a really linear and boring game. So we'll be basing events in the scenarios and the locations that Lovecraft originally wrote about. In fact, we'll be using those quite a lot.

IGNPC: So what will be the basic aim for gamers? Are you just sending them out on an octopus hunt?

AB: Kind of, yeah. The game will be split up into four stories, and each story will have a specific individual goal. In the first story, you start off investigating the disappearance of a shop clerk and from these nondescript beginnings you find out about stuff that drives you deeper into the mystery. This is all set in this town called Innsmouth and you find out about this lot of history of the Innsmouth citizens' relationships with these creatures called Deep Ones. These creatures live in the sea, and are kind of like fish sort of demon-type creatures. You start to uncover this long history of the humans interacting with the Deep Ones. The Deep Ones are providing the humans with the gold and stuff from the sea, in exchange for intersplicing their genes with the humans. You have this creepy scenario where you have normal humans, and then you have what are called hybrids, they're starting to look like Deep Ones, they call it the Innsmouth Taint, where their eyes start to bulge and their mouths start to widen. So as well as the normal humans there, you've got these other people who are really going to be out to hinder you. That's just one of the stories, the other ones we haven't done that much work on to be honest. We've haven't been started all that long but that's the sort of idea of one of the stories. Eventually you begin to discover more and more about the Mythos and stuff. We're not too sure of an ultimate goal, generally in Lovecraft's books, there wasn't really an ultimate finish: "and the baddie was killed, the end." It wasn't really like that, so most of his investigators in his stories, ended up going completely mad by the end of the book...There's never really a definite end, but we'll have to work one in. We're not quite sure what it'll be.

IGNPC: How is the gamer going to be drawn into these stories, are there going to be FMV's or are players going to have to work it out on their own...

AB: Well, they'll be lots of other characters for him to talk to that will progress the story. Initially at the start of the game, you get to choose between one of four characters to play, and the three you don't choose will play the game themselves, so they'll carry on investigating the same things as you, under computer control. You may come across them at times; you may get information of them, find out what they've seen and heard and maybe even team up with them at times to solve puzzles. With multiple human players playing, then you can have up to four people playing the same story simultaneously. In cases they can co-operate to solve puzzles, or kill a creature, or whatever.

IGNPC: In four-player mode, how's that going to work? For example what if they're not there to help you out?

AB: That's going to be a problem, but you'll have the communication with the other players, so you can contact them if you really need to. When they're under computer control, they may appear to help you out with things, but they're never going to save you from death or something. It's usually going to be along the lines of they impart some information or they run a diversion for you whilst you go in another entrance of the building or whatever. There's never going to be any life or death scenarios because if the human player didn't do the right thing ... well obviously you'd get in serious trouble. When humans are playing the four characters, then their interaction will mostly be along the lines of imparting information to each other or telling if they've got this object, or whatever so that's really how they help each other out.

IGNPC: So there's going to be an emphasis on help in multiplayer?

AB: Yeah, it's going to be totally cooperative. We're going to put a deathmatch in as well, just because it's like, "why not?" really. So action fans will still want to pick it up. But Lovecraft's stories weren't really about running round with guns shooting everything, so that's not the focus of the normal game, but yeah, we'll put a deathmatch mode in anyway just to have a bit of a laugh really.

IGNPC: So what kind of weapons will you have to fight with?

AB: There'll be guns, but they'll never really be used. Because it's set in the twenties, a revolver and a sub-machine gun is about as good as it gets. So the players will have a limited arsenal and they can use it occasionally, but a lot of the creatures in the mythos stories are so powerful that you just shoot them with a gun and they'll just get ticked off. It basically doesn't do anything. The guns will be used as a deterrent really rather than a major tool in the game.

IGNPC: There's going to be more thinking to do on this one then?

AB: Totally. It's definitely going to be more adventure discovery, rather than blast-away action. In that respect it's kind of light hearted. If you look at Half-Life and see how they introduce the kind of thinking puzzles rather than "pulling this lever to open that door" then that's a step towards what we're aiming for. We're going to take it to the next level to make it more thinking, so it's more like an adventure but it's still got the elements of action in there as well. But it is definitely going to be more of a thinking man's game rather than a blind running around and shooting things type. We're trying to keep it intellectual in keeping with the novels.

IGNPC: How far along are you?

AB: At the moment we're working on a tech demo, which is for the purpose of trying to secure a publisher. When we've got that secured and financial backing we'll get on it full steam ahead. When we completely finish Simon 3D in the next couple of months, we'll have more resources to throw at it as well. At the moment, it's just a tech demo, which will be like one like level where we demonstrate some of the gameplay principles we're doing. We're aiming to showcase some unique gameplay elements or stuff that's not really tried before, and than that will hopefully impress the publishers.

IGNPC: Unique... sounds intriguing. Can you give us any hints?

AB: Well, one of the main features of the game is insanity. A major part of the RPG is that the investigator discovers horrifying information or sees horrendous things happening. They start to lose sanity, so that's the bit we're going to be including. The player will find out as he goes through that if he's slapdash about everything, and just runs round shooting things as he goes through, it's going to start affecting his sanity. He'll start to go slightly insane. He might hallucinate or hear things that aren't there, start to get jittery. All these things we can get across through like the control system or the graphics. By the end of the game, you could end up with a player who is totally crazy. This would work especially well with the multiplayer with a couple of human players, because they'll have different sanity ratings by the end of the game. One of them, if they're hallucinating, may see a human as a horrible creature, whereas the other one, if he's saner, may see him as a human. You've got that sort of element as well. The players will start to get jittery, or start to stutter, or get vertigo. We can build all these things in fairly easily.

IGNPC: So everyone's experience will be unique to them?

AB: Yeah, it will depend totally on the player. If a player's really cautious and careful, he might end up getting through the game with hardly any sanity loss at all. Their path will be relatively easy, they'll see things as they are and stuff. But if someone is just running around and doesn't really think about what they're doing, they could get pretty mad fairly soon, which will make it more difficult for them to progress.

IGNPC: Would you say the main aim of Cthulhu is to terrify people?

AB: Yes, that's what we want to do really. We're hoping that it'll end up being the scariest game of all time. That's a nice aim. Whether or not it will be ... but we're going to try our best. We've done a lot of the right research into it, even talked to psychologists about it. We got someone to write a load of stuff for us about how people are affected by fear, and what makes a horror film scary for instance. And so we're looking into all of that scientifically almost to try and find out what really scares people, and exactly why people feel scared so ... and then we'll build that into the game hopefully.

IGNPC: It sounds tricky to implement.

AB: Yeah, well we've done a lot research into all the different things we can do. I mean we can get phobias and psychological disorders and stuff in. In the Cthulhu source book there's a massive list of all sorts of phobias and fears that investigators can contract. We're going to try and emulate as many of them as we really can.

AB: It could be, yeah. But besides frightening characters and creatures things like fear of heights and stuff will be included. It's easy enough to do. You can have a player just standing on top of a building or something, you could have the ground coming up towards him. That sort of psychological, sort of scary element is something that we're really trying to build on as much as possible.

IGNPC: Are you going to do that through sound and vision?

AB: Yes, sound, music and graphics. We're going to try and build in what we call interactive cut scenes, which are basically events that happen which the player can witness. But we don't want these sequences to be something that you've got no control over. For example, in Half-Life you can arrive somewhere and there'll be a little scene going on. You can stand there and watch it, or you can ignore it if you want. We'll be building a lot of those type of sequences in to keep the player on edge. We get things like moving shadows, when they're looking one way, you can just see something move out of the corner of your eye.

IGNPC: It all sounds pretty intensive. How do the hardcore Lovecraft fans feel about it all?

AB: A lot of them have provided a lot of helpful feedback. There's quite a cross over really between game designers and gaming communities, game developing people and Lovecraft fans. Quite a few of them are game designers or involved in game development themselves. So they've been able to provide a lot of advice hints and tips really. We have a lot of emails from fans as well saying that "the game looks really good" or "I've been waiting to see the game for ages", and "I can't wait ..." And when we tell them that it's not going to come out until the end of 2001 or something, they're a bit disappointed. But the general consensus is that the game has been a long time coming, and they're glad to see someone actually doing it now.